Showing results for "Will Self" in Historical Fiction

Standing by the mailbox in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her child and husband, an Ivy League academic, inside her house and wonders...is this it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that ends her marriage and upends her life. Based on the intimate diaries Will Self's mother kept for over forty years, Elaine is a writer's attempt to reach the almost unimaginable realm of a parent's interior life prior to his own existence.

4th May, 1970. President Nixon has ordered American ground forces into Cambodia. By the end of the day four students will be shot dead in the grounds of Kent State University. On the other side of the Atlantic, maverick psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner has been tricked into joining a decidedly ill advised LSD trip. Five years later, sitting in a nearby cinema watching Steven Spielberg's Jaws, Busner realizes the true nature of the events that transpired on that dread-soaked day.

Will Self is one of the most inimitable contemporary writers in the English language. In this brilliantly conceived new novel Self turns his forensic eye and technicolor imagination to the troubled life of his mother, Elaine. Standing by the mailbox outside 1100 Hemlock Street in Ithaca, New York, Elaine thinks of her husband and child inside her house and wonders: is this . . . it? As she begins to push back against the strictures of her life in 1950s America, she undertakes a disastrous affair that places her marriage to an Ivy League academic and former Communist Party member in peril.